[German for tar pit] A trap
set to punish spammers who use an address harvester;
a mail server deliberately set up to be really, really slow. To activate
it, scatter addresses that look like users on the teergrube's host in
places where the address harvester will be trolling (one popular way is to
embed the fake address in a Usenet sig block next to a human-readable
warning not to send mail to it). The address harvester will dutifully
collect the address. When the spammer tries to mailbomb it, his mailer
will get stuck.